Thoughts from the interface of science, religion, law and culture

After spending several years touring the country as a stand up comedian, Ed Brayton tired of explaining his jokes to small groups of dazed illiterates and turned to writing as the most common outlet for the voices in his head. He has appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show and the Thom Hartmann Show, and is almost certain that he is the only person ever to make fun of Chuck Norris on C-SPAN.

Science blogs

EVENTS

Ooh, the Exact Date of the Flood

The website for the Creation Science Hall of Fame is really quite funny. In one recent article, for instance, they pinpoint the exact date for the (entirely fictitious) global flood from which Noah escaped on a boat filled with animals. And you’re going to love the, uh, “reasoning.”

An astronomical date for the Global Flood is now available. This date derives from a statistical analysis of the observations of a large number of comets having the most clock-like orbits. It is simply the most likely year that all these comets would be a perihelion at the same time. The actual date of the Global Flood would be several months after (or before) this common perihelion. On that date, the fountains of the great deep literally launched the water, rock and mud that escaped into space and persist today as comets, asteroids, and meteoroids.

The implications of this find should stagger the imagination of all who consider them. Obviously this vindicates the Hydroplate Theory of the Global Flood – and further to the point, it vindicates the Global Flood itself. And it therefore vindicates all the rest of Genesis chh. 1-11.

*scratches head* Come again?

The date of the Global Flood comes from a recent calculation by Walter T. Brown, Jr., PhD, originator of the Hydroplate Theory. He examined the most clock-like comets in the 2008 Catalog of Cometary Orbits, for which enough observations were available to establish reliable orbital periods…

“In the six hundredth year of the life of Noah, in the second month, in the seventeenth day of the month,” the crust failed. (Genesis 7:11) That failure happened roughly where the Mid-Oceanic Ridge now stands. The failure began as a crack, literally microscopic in breadth. This crack rapidly widened and lengthened, until it ran the full length of the present Mid-Oceanic Ridge system. (The Mid-Oceanic Ridge is 46,000 miles long and wraps around the earth like the stitched seam of a baseball.)

All that water came rushing out of its subcrustal chamber, at hypersonic speed. It eroded the land mass for about 400 miles to either side. Beneath it, the floor of the chamber buckled up, now that all the weight pressing on it abruptly lifted. The two parts of the land mass slid down the slope that thus formed. North and South America fell away to the west, and Europe and Africa to the east. When they eventually crashed, they crushed and buckled up, to form the mountain chains we know today. (Note: Mount Everest did not rear itself up until late in the Flood year. So we have no reason to suppose that the Flood waters covered Mount Everest as Mount Everest.)

And some of the water, rock and mud that came rushing out of that chamber did not fall back to earth. A large amount, about one percent of the total mass of the earth, is still in space. It went into orbit around the sun, moved beyond earth’s gravitational influence, and then accreted to form several types of objects. These objects persist as the comets, asteroids, and meteoroids of today.

Wow. Seriously? They think that comets, asteroids and meteorites all have a terrestrial origin? There isn’t a shred of evidence for that claim, of course. Indeed, even the Bible itself says nothing remotely like that. This is pulled directly from Walt Brown’s rectal cavity, but I can’t imagine how he got it past his head that is so clearly lodged there as well. Even by creationists standards, this is simply lunacy.

Wow. Seriously? They think that comets, asteroids and meteorites all have a terrestrial origin? There isn’t a shred of evidence for that claim, of course. Indeed, even the Bible itself says nothing remotely like that. This is pulled directly from Walt Brown’s rectal cavity

Well, those flying things are made of dirt. Right? The earth is made of dirt so it makes sense. They got into the air by God surfing on the tectonic plates and bursting forth from the earths rectal cavity.
Makes just as much sense as anything else in the Babble.

This date derives from a statistical analysis of the observations of a large number of comets having the most clock-like orbits. It is simply the most likely year that all these comets would be a perihelion at the same time.

In case you all are wondering what a creationist might consider a “large number of comets” to be, the answer is 5.

I spent almost twenty seconds trying to picture how all that crap ended up with completely different orbits with completely different periods, then realized what I was doing and gave my head a sharp whack with the nearest wall.

I love how in their mad rush to dispute anything that disagrees with the Bible, they come up with some of the most absurd mechanisms that have nothing to do with what’s in the Bible. Where the hell in the Bible is there anything about Mount Everest (or any mountain) rising up “late in the Flood year”. And the random super-specific details: “That failure happened roughly where the Mid-Oceanic Ridge now stands. The failure began as a crack, literally microscopic in breadth. This crack rapidly widened and lengthened, until it ran the full length of the present Mid-Oceanic Ridge system.” What?

And their fetishistic focus on the “fountains of the deep” and trying to justify that stupid idea that water somehow comes from inside the earth.

And some of the water, rock and mud that came rushing out of that chamber did not fall back to earth. A large amount, about one percent of the total mass of the earth, is still in space.

Well, thank goodness for that. Any more mass rocketing up and coming back down would’ve done some real damage. Bless the Lord and His infinite wisdom.

Mr Ed“As for a mid-ocean ridge that that wraps the world like a baseball I can’t but help see the hand of Slartibartfast”
Now you’re just being ridiculous. This is serious science. Slartibartfast did fjords.

imrryr“In case you all are wondering what a creationist might consider a ‘large number of comets’ to be, the answer is 5.”
To be fair, five is a pretty big number.

Wow. Seriously? They think that comets, asteroids and meteorites all have a terrestrial origin?

If you add up the mass of all the asteroids and comets in the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud, it is a lot more than the mass of the earth. Among other bodies, there are several pluto class planets, i.e Sedna and the others.

That would mean the old sky fairy not only nearly genocided his chosen creatures but nearly destroyed their planet. We are living on a shrunken new earth.

Oh well, the sky fairy has never been know for his benevolence or competence. After killing all but 8 and shooting most of the earth into space, it still didn’t work. We are the same humans we always were.

Apparently the total mass of all meteors and comets is only 1% of the earth’s total mass. All the rest of those balls of rock and ice must be something else, which I’m sure the creationists will explain. Coming soon: the “God’s Dingleberries” theory of comets.

Instead, one can predict the most likely date for the perihelia of all examined comets to coincide. To do this, one need only algebraically subtract the oldest known period of any comet from the date of the last recorded observation, and account for the cumulative errors.

For the physics people who love to crunch numbers: Wouldn’t this catastrophe end up superheating the planet or something? I seem to recall a LOT of the flood theories would do that.

Since it sounds like the “sub-crustal” (I don’t think that’s the right geological term, btw) water reservoir was under pressure, cracking it open and releasing a bunch of water would have an overall cooling effect. Local or short-term effects might be different depending on the original temperature of that water, but I don’t think it could have been too hot, or everything in the ark would have cooked together cajun-style in the first day of scalding rain. Maybe later today I’ll run some numbers, and see how much water at how much pressure would have been necessary for this theory to work. The amount of cooling might turn out to be amusing – a 100 K global temperature drop, for example, would be pretty hard to explain.

What I noticed is, barring unlikely close encounters with large bodies like planets, all comets have perfectly regular periods, even the ones that get close enough to the sun that you need relativity to calculate them precisely. So when he talks about comets with “the most clock-like orbits” there is literally nothing that could mean except “these are the comets that make my theory work.”

I had to go over to RationalWiki and brush up on hydroplate theory. To my utter lack of surprise, “Walter Brown, PhD” has a doctorate in mechanical engineering. Crap. If I had a nickel for every creationist engineer I ran into in my career, I could probably by a Starbucks latte.

Well, those flying things are made of dirt. Right? The earth is made of dirt so it makes sense.

Of course, it’s exactly like Sir Bedevere’s razor-sharp logic:

– Does wood sink in water?
– No, it floats. – Throw her into the pond!
– What also floats in water?
– Bread. – Apples.
– Very small rocks. – Cider! Great gravy.
– Cherries. Mud. – Churches.
– Lead. – A duck!
– Exactly.
– So, logically–
– If she weighs the same as a duck…
– she’s made of wood.
– And therefore?
– A witch!

This cannot be correct. The world was flat back then. If it had separated along the mid-ocean ridge you’d have two flat planets with the sun orbiting around both of them in either a lazy-eight or a cuban-eight pattern. And all the water would have fallen over the edges and drowned those four elephants. The turtle, being amphibious would have been okay!

Did the force of the water rising from under the crust also destroy the metal bowl that made up the sky?

Also, if all this subterranean water suddenly left the Abzu, was anything left of Enki’s realm? If nothing was left, was this Enki’s punishment for warning Atra-Hasis about the coming Flood?

Furthermore, without the primordial waters to support the ground, there must have been places that caved in. Could this explain the sinking of Numenor and Atlantis? Or was this much earlier, at the time of the flooding of Beleriand?

I’ve heard this arglebarble before. Usually, it includes the claim that the water rushing out like a jet also formed the Moon’s craters. Never mind that the far side of the Moon is even more heavily cratered or that most other solid bodies in the Solar System are also heavily cratered.

Creationism isn’t about finding a theory that fits the data. It’s about cherry picking data to fit the story.

Isn’t this an awful lot of work? Bishop Ussher calculated the Creation by working backwards through the ages of characters in the Old Testament. Just stop at Noah’s six-hundredth birthday party. Plenty enough accuracy for a Bible where pi = 3.

This reminds me of when I asked my freshmen in mythology class to make up a myth of their own.
They tended to have fantastic imaginations, too. The difference was that they knew from the outset that their stories weren’t true.

@Robert B.: Since you brought up that cooling effect, I guess this might not follow that same trope. My gut tells me that to expel comet-sized balls of dirty water, that hydroplate is going to need so much pressure the rock on top of it wouldn’t be able to hold it. And I’m sure moving it deeper underground would cause other problems.

Incidentally, I’m reminded of one of the first big physics debunking I read as a teen, aside from the popular Santa one: Carl Sagan versus Velikovski’s Worlds in Collision. I was probably thinking about that, since part of it included Jupiter spitting out Venus, allegedly because the myth of Athena (represented by the planet Venus in Aphrodite’s place for some reason) being born out of Zeus/Jupiter’s head was inspired by the act. Velikovski also had two huge bodies flying by Earth to stop and restart its rotation so that the sun would stand still for a day, neglecting the apocalyptic disaster such an event would cause. Twice. Oh, and there was a bit where he didn’t know the difference between hydrocarbons and carbohydrates, leaving the wandering Jews to eat oil from heaven.

Beneath it, the floor of the chamber buckled up, now that all the weight pressing on it abruptly lifted.

I had to read that a couple times before picturing just how wrong it was. You’ve got this chamber under a supercontinent filled with super-pressurized water. All the water suddenly empties out through a hole in the cieling, so now you’ve got a void sitting under a giant continent and a flood-sized amount of water. But does that void collapse in on itself? Of course not! According to biblelogic, what happens next is that the floor of the chamber goes up through the cieling to form an enormous ridge, down which…

…The two parts of the land mass slid down the slope that thus formed.

What did they slide on, huh? And how did they stay in two big pieces? And where did that giant ridge go?

The whole thing reads like an 8 year old’s vision of force and mass. No, forget that, I bet an 8 year old could build a lego model of the above situation and show all the problems with it.

There was a great (and long, as in months long) discussion with a really stubborn creationist about the Wally Wonderpants Theory of jet propelled continental plates over at Talk Rational a few years ago. We did all the calculations for launching comets, moving continents, etc. Pretty much, the energy involved would have vaporized the entire planet.

It proved once again that creationists shouldn’t try to shoehorn their fairy tales into reality using science. If they were smart (heh, yeah, I just said that.) they would just say goddiditallwithmagic, and be done. They got the smug, self righteous looks down already. ;)

This evidence actually supports reincarnation, because Walter T. Brown Jr. must be Immanuel Velikovsky brought back to life.

You remember Velikovsky. He was the author of Worlds in Collision and Earth in Upheaval and “Mind in Disarray.” (OK, I made up that last one.) Among his claims was that Venus was flung out of Jupiter and made several close passes by Earth, causing the disasters mentioned in the Old Testament.

Referring to Velikovsky’s claim that the manna which allegedly fed the Hebrews in the desert came from his great comet, Carl Sagan had a great line. He wrote that apparently the only thing that didn’t fall from the comet was cholesterol to harden Pharaoh’s heart.

As a geologist, Brown’s, uh, hypothesis (it sure isn’t a theory, and I’m even being kind calling it a hypothesis) makes me want to roll on the floor laughing madly. It seems too funny to be true, and I want to believe it’s a Poe, but I suspect it isn’t.

Referring to Velikovsky’s claim that the manna which allegedly fed the Hebrews in the desert came from his great comet, Carl Sagan had a great line.

As did Isaac Asimov in his essay Worlds in Confusion. He pointed out that Velikovsky said hydrocarbons entered the atmosphere, and when they reached the surface, had been magically transformed into carbohydrates.

As best I can tell, the crust is supposed to have been one solid piece on top of the water. The weight of all that rock on top would indeed have put the water under enormous pressure, about 400 MPa (about 4000 atmospheres). Now, let’s open a one-square-meter crack in the crust of arbitrary shape, ignoring friction at the edges. The top cubic meter of water beneath that suddenly-opened crack is under a net upward force of 400 meganewtons. (Under the circumstances, the downward force of gravity on the water is negligible.)

We’ll guess that the force remained at that average for the whole distance through the crust, which in the mid-Atlantic is about 6 km, for a total work of about 2.5 terajoules on 1000 kg of water. The water is now rising at a hundred thousand meters per second. It will indeed escape Earth’s gravity. If the atmosphere didn’t get in the way, it would escape the sun’s gravity and splash Alpha Centauri. However, the atmospheric drag on an enormous supersonic jet of water that may be either a liquid or a gas or both is seriously complicated fluid dynamics, and I’m the kind of physicist who starts complaining when you put three whole electrons in the same problem, so I’m not really going to think about that much.

However. The total mass ejected into space is claimed to have been 1% of Earth’s mass, about 60 yottagrams. If you are not familiar with the more extreme metric prefixes, suffice it to say, that is quite a lot of grams. To get that much mass out of Earth’s orbit, the pressure has done a rock bottom minimum 5 x 10^31 joules of work. We get some of that energy back from the gravitational potential energy of the Earth’s crust as it drops through the space left suddenly vacant by all that ejected water, a distance averaging somewhere in the tens of kilometers. But that’s only about 10^27 joules, which gets lost in all the flagrant and shameless rounding I’m doing. The net energy loss would cool the entire planet by an average of 10000 K… wait, say what?

*checks my math*

Yyyyyup. A ten thousand degree temperature drop. That number doesn’t even make sense. Even the inner core is only about 5000 K. If we very kindly assume that the temperature change was everywhere proportional to the current temperature, so that most of the heat was lost from the center of the earth, we’re still assuming that the entire planet was three to four times hotter before the flood than afterward. Presently the surface is about 300 K, so before the flood it would have had to be 900-1200 K. Hopefully Noah’s wife didn’t wrap his lunch in aluminum foil, because it would have melted and made his sandwich soggy.

Let’s go back to the part where the entire surface of the earth falls a few tens of kilometers, though. The energy of that falling will eventually end up as heat, the same heat that got lost in the rounding a few paragraphs back. Before it was heat, though, it would have been kinetic energy – motion, in the crust and in the water suddenly flowing on top of it. The wave action would have been inconceivable, in the very literal sense that I can’t think of what the wave action would have been. (See above re: complicated fluid dynamics.)

At a wild guess, at least one percent of the energy would have ended up transferred to the ocean, in exactly the same way that earthquake energy is transferred to tsunamis. That’s ten thousand joules of kinetic energy per kilogram of water, on average, over the entire ocean. (I’m assuming the ocean had the same mass then as now – as far as I can tell, Doc Brown is arguing that it’s not that the water was all that deep, it’s that the continents and mountains as we know them were upthrust late in this same event and so the flood didn’t actually have to cover them.) If all that energy was kinetic at the same time, the water would have been moving at an average speed of about 100 m/s, in nowhere close to all the same direction. If this motion took the form of waves like we’re familiar with (which I doubt it would) they would be hundreds or thousands of meters tall. That’s a pounding that nothing bigger than plankton would have survived.

If the kinetic energy was damping out to thermal almost as fast as it was being converted from potential, then we can save the fish, but (more wild guesswork) we’re still talking about forty days of the kind of sea you get in a hurricane. I doubt any modern ship could have survived that, let alone a wooden hull without so much as an iron nail to its name. And if the crash actually took longer then the flood, as Doc Brown implies, it’s even worse – once you’re on land, that kinetic energy takes the form of a whole series of colossal earthquakes lasting weeks or months. If you’re near the ocean – and for a while there wouldn’t have been anywhere that wasn’t near the ocean – those death waves are now tsunamis.

That’s about all the math I care to do on this, though if anyone wants to see my calculations I can probably reproduce them on request. And by the way, I didn’t use anything but basic mechanics and thermodynamics, plus wikipedia – certainly nothing a mechanical engineer wouldn’t know about. Brown has no excuse.

So a supersonic plume of supercritical water at around 400Mpa and 5000K comes shooting out of the Earth, presumably this is going to displace an equivalent volume of seawater from the surface (giant tsunamis) and the air too. Since a difference in pressure of a mere 20 μPa is the equivalent of 1 decibel,,,, Funny how nobody mentions hearing the almighty bang nor having all their internal organs burst by the huge overpressure.
Then there’s the effect of this sudden loss of mass on the Earth’s rotation and orbital parameters. You would expect conservation of momentum in the earth’s rotation, thus major changes in the ‘day’ length, and you would expect that the sudden jet of gas to increase the eccentricity (at the least) to effect the Earth’s ‘year’. Nobody seems to notice such changes
Then there’s the moon. It would have been blasted by a jet of supercritical water at some point in it’s orbit (perhaps multiple times) yet no trace of such a plume has been found on the moon’s surface….

It’s like counting all the ways that Total Recall‘s end is scientifically silly.

Ooh, the pressure change in the atmosphere, I didn’t think of that. Crack open a can of 4000 atmospheres, and the resulting movement of gases will be neither a wind nor a sound, but an explosion. With the mass of a planetoid (1% of earth is 6e22 kg, not 6e23) behind that ridiculous pressure, you’d strip the biosphere down to bedrock, if it was the more durable sort of bedrock. Your elven leather helm godly wooden boat would not protect you. Good one, dingojack.

@50
“Then there’s the effect of this sudden loss of mass on the Earth’s rotation and orbital parameters”
Well, the earth would have been a rocket, it would have definitively changed it’s orbit. Depending on the direction of the jet the earth would have ended closer or farther from the sun
Also, as the jet struck the atmosphere it would have given the air an impulse, so we would have lost a lot of the air, too.
And what about the dust? All this air and water moving around and the crust “falling” for… 120km???
Yeah, if we assume that 1% of earth was water, roughly a non-compressible fluid, all that mass of water would fill about 120km below the crust. Now a void space to be filled by the falling crust. And a little boat with a zoologic on top of it.

In fact, I suspect that hydroplate’s theorists are thinking about the erath like a ballon, with tension over it’s surface and keeping the air inside until it breaks. That’s also absurd. Imagine that the water is going out, the crust will try to get closer to the earths core (yes creationists, it’s called gravity) , and you are tying to fit a surface of an esphere of an R radius into a surface of an esfere of R-x radius.
Best guess: the crust seals the hole waaay before all this water has gotten out

Heh. The absurdity keeps on giving. I didn’t think about the thrust spewing that much escape velocity water would produce.

In fact, I suspect that hydroplate’s theorists are thinking about the erath like a ballon, with tension over it’s surface and keeping the air inside until it breaks. That’s also absurd.

I’m reminded of a nutty guy who claimed the Earth was expanding and that continental drift was nonsense. Even had a little CGI movie of the Earth inflating like a balloon with the modern continents intact.

Left me wondering where all the ocean water was coming from, since they started out small but presumably maintained a semi-constant sea level as they grew. I also wondered what was going on in the core. Mass coming from nowhere? Dense radioactive elements decaying into the iron core we have today? Just raises too many questions.

You know I just had to calculate this stuff:
in order to flood the Earth high enough to cover the 29000ft peak of Mt. Everest you’d need 4.5155065 x 10^9 cubic kilometres of water or some 4.5155085 x 10^21 kilograms of water (7.5611295 x 10^-4 Earth masses)*. In order to conserve momentum the Earth, having lost that mass, would have to move out from 0.9984803 A.U. to it’s present position. That would be drop in temperature of 0.218 degrees Celsius (or about 35 years of global warming in only 40 days! — about 320 times faster than the current level of increase) but nobody noticed, despite being agricultural people.(Similar to average temps 9, 8 and 2 thousand years ago).